If there's one thing most touchscreen tablets all have in common, it seems to be the overall sex appeal, and Toshiba's new JournE touch multimedia tablet is no exception.

While the 7-inch touchscreen steals the show, beneath the surface Toshiba's sleek JournE suports a number of codecs, including H.264, DivX, and WMV. It also adds 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi support, multimedia and social app integration (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and more), and IE running on Windows CE 6.0 Pro.

It also comes with an HDMI port in the unit's dock and can output HD video.

As this is a prototype, final specifications are likely to change, and there's no word yet on price or availability. In the meantime, you can catch a video of Engadget getting touchy-feely with the JournE here.

If you think of HP’s 2530p as a strapping workhorse of an ultraportable, Toshiba’s R600 is like a stylish, sophisticated cousin—and we were quickly smitten with its charms. The R600 shares much in common with Toshiba’s R500, but with improvements to its build quality and structure. At 11.1x8.5x0.8 inches and a weight of two pounds, six ounces, the R600 is so thin and light as to seem ethereal. There’s some flex to the magnesium-alloy case when you lift the notebook by one corner and some bendiness to the display enclosure, but the notebook doesn’t feel fragile.

And svelte as it is, the R600 is packed with features. It offers a healthy array of ports, including an SD media reader, an ExpressCard/54 slot, and three USB ports—one of which doubles as eSATA and can even be used for charging devices when the notebook is off. Amid all that is a DVD burner, as well as a volume dial.

After strongly backing HD-DVD during the format wars of yesteryear, Toshiba has announced that they plan on releasing a Blu-ray player, and have applied to join the Blu-ray Disc Association.

“In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA,” stated an official press release. “Toshiba aims to introduce digital products that support the Blu-ray format, including BD players and notebook PCs integrating BD drives, in the course of this year. Details of the products, including the timing of regional launches, are now under consideration. We will make announcements in due course.”

So, as you can gather, there’s no word yet on any pricing or availability, but they’ll surely keep the world posted.

For some time now we’ve been hearing about the wonders of the SDXC flash media cards, and their ability to reach up to 2TB of storage. And, as evidence of the progress of this medium, Toshiba recently announced that they’d have 64GB cards ready by 2010.

This year Toshiba will be offering faster versions of their 16GB and 32GB flash cards using the SDXC format, thanks to Microsoft’s exFAT file system. The exFAT system will allow individual files to exceed 4GB, which is important for videos.

No word on how much it’ll cost or when exactly it’ll be out, but we’ll surely keep you posted.

After hostilities ceased between the Toshiba-backed HD DVD format and Sony’s Blu-ray, Toshiba had to grudgingly admit defeat. With the HD DVD format having been dead for quite a while now, it is safe to assume that the defeat has been fully digested. Toshiba has now put aside all bitterness that may have remained from its duel with Sony as it readies itself to enter the Blu-ray market. Toshiba’s maiden Blu-ray player will become available by the end of year, according to a PC World report.

Normally, aesthetics are a secondary part of a notebook review, but Toshiba forces the issue with the Qosmio X305’s wild design. Seriously, the lid’s audacious three-tone, metallic-red paint job alone is enough to challenge the interest of a potential buyer, but the X305 also sports an unusual formfactor involving curves and lips that add to both the machine’s footprint and height. And like the majority of notebooks in its class, the 17-inch X305 is heavy—although, with a carry weight of approximately 11 and a half pounds, it’s still more than a pound lighter than the CyberPower Extreme M1 we reviewed last month.

Of course, there’s more to the Toshiba X305 than its physical spectacle. The machine has the distinction of housing a 2GHz Core 2 Quad Mobile Q9000 processor, making it only the second quad notebook we’ve reviewed—the first was Lenovo’s Kick Ass ThinkPad W700 (http://tinyurl.com/al9wjn). Those two extra cores gave the X305 a healthy advantage over its higher-clocked, dual-core competitors in our application benchmarks. In Premiere Pro CS3, ProShow Producer, and MainConcept Reference, which are all heavily multithreaded, the X305 surpassed all the dual-core rigs we’ve reviewed over the last several months—including the 2.8GHz HP HDX 18 we reviewed in January—by greater than 50 percent, in most cases. Interestingly, it also scored much better than those machines in Photoshop, which isn’t heavily multithreaded. We attribute it more to the X305’s hard drive configuration: a speedy Toshiba 64GB SSD is dedicated to the OS, while applications write to a virtually empty 320GB HDD.

Toshiba has taken note of the importance of digital security these days, and with that thought in mind they’ve released several new external hard drives for those that are hoping to keep their tracks thoroughly covered.

With the introduction of their new portable external hard drives, they’re hoping to make data security something that’s easily accessible to everyone (just so long as they have one of their drives). The drives will feature NTI BackupNow EZ software (for Windows users), which will allow the backup of an entire system with a click. It’ll also be able to scan your computer, and provide a personalized recommendation on the best way to cover your files.

There will also be password protection with up to 256-bit encryption. All of this will be accessed through a graphical interface, which Toshiba expects will make “backing up digital data easier than ever.”

“We’ve increased the level of protection offered by our personal storage products, while making them easier to use,” stated Manuel Camarena, product manager for consumer storage at Toshiba Storage Device Division. “Data backup usually isn’t a consumer’s first thought, but it is the most important consideration for preserving a lifetime of digital memories, entertainment libraries and the entire computer system. Enhanced backup features combined with password-protected encryption create a true digital safety net that any consumer can use to protect against system failure and unauthorized access to their digital content.”

These drives are available now in 500GB and 320GB flavors, and will run you $149.99 and $119.99 respectively.

Most chip manufacturers are busy readying the move to a 32nm manufacturing process, including Toshiba, which back in April of this year said it would begin mass producing 32Gb (gigabit) chips from the shrunken process by next month. But forget about 32nm - Toshiba says it has made a breakthrough in the use of strontium germanide (SrGex) that will make 16nm possible sooner than expected.

The breakthrough involves the development of a gate stack and interlayer with high carrier mobility that can be applied to metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MISFETs), ElectronicsWeekly.com reports. Today's MSIFETs use silicon for the channel, however the substance is reaching its design limit in terms of current handling capabilities.

Germanium presents design challenges too, namely the development of thin gate structures. According to Toshiba, it can get around these challenges by combining SrGex, a compound of strontium, and germanium, for use as an interlayer between the high-k insulating layer and the germanium channel.

The details get even geekier, but you'll have to wait for Toshiba to present the technology at the 2009 VLSI Symposia in Kyoto, Japan later this week.

Today Toshiba's taking the wraps off its new netbook. That's right, the same people who brought you the original ultra-portable, the Libretto, are rolling out their first sub-$400 netbook! We got our hands on a pre-production sample of the NB200-series netbooks.

Toshiba sat out the first generation of netbooks, so they could address shortcomings with the genre, and at first glance the NB205 seems to make good on that. The main typing keys are full-size and use a chiclet-style design. When paired with Toshiba's standard-sized touchpad (the largest we've seen on a netbook to date), this is an extremely comfortable laptop for typing. Toshiba claims 9.5 hours of battery life (we haven't tested yet, but we'd expect 6ish hours in a real-world scenario).

Toshiba's facial recognition technology isn't new, but up until now, it hasn't been used in motor vehicles. During a recent demo, Toshiba showed how its system would allow drivers to control the A/C or change radio stations just by a glance, as well as alert distracted drivers who take their eyes off the road for an extended time.

Making all this possible is a camera that sits above the steering wheel. The camera can identify and map the driver's facial expressions, including head movement, eye direction, and blinks. Eventually this could even be used to alert drowsy drivers, Toshiba says.

It might be awhile before you get to actually play with this stuff, however, Toshiba says it doesn't currently have any immediate plans to commercialize its system or work with any auto makers, and instead is focusing on further developing the technology.